Blaze's SSX Tricky Advance Impressions
Believe it or not -- but I've been waiting for this game for quite some time. I heard all the good things said about the Next-gen versions that after seeing a few eye-popping screenshots I thought the GBA version would be just as good.

Well, it's not bad. However, I always heard that SSX Tricky was about Jumping into the air several hundred feet and doing insane tricks all the way down -- kind of like a San Francisco Rush of Snowboarding. The GBA version lacks this entirely -- okay, I don't mind that much, really.

However, outside of all the pretty graphics and nice visuals... this game is... eh. The trick system is one of the most sluggish I've ever had the oppertunity of trying. For the life of me I cannot get the hang of it -- I've learned that no matter how high in the air I go I must not try anything fancy, or else my boarder will end up on his head. Characters spin and turn so very, very slowly while in mid-air and it's comically easy to accidentally start doing a trick because of the strange controller setup -- Holding up makes you accelerate -- however, holding up also makes you turn in mid-air while doing a trick, you see. This creates two distinct problems:

- If you don't want to spin forward during a jump, you must let go of the Up button -- effectively slowing you down each time you jump.

- If you're like me you constantly forget to STOP holding up when you tap the button to jump over an obstacle -- which in turns sending you spinning forward very slowly directly into the wall.

The Tutorial mode to help you get a grasp on tricks is comical in itself -- I found that while the CPU can obviously do tricks much faster than I could (and always has a completely maxed out Tricky bar, surprise), it did nothing to help me come to grips as to how I could do the same thing without planting myself face-first into the powder. (if anybody has any incredible insight on this, lemme know)

The graphics however are very nice; with up to 5 boarders on screen at one time with very little slowdown -- and a polygonal course. However, the lack of a Z-buffer shows itself nastily when mysteriously you can see boarders through walls and hills.